I’m not so charitable to Roosevelt. I don’t think he just got “hoodwinked”. He was a radical progressive, basically a socialist himself, so he was sympathetic to the communists and probably wanted them to win, which is why he tried to hand them the world on a silver platter.
Roosevelt and his ilk undeniably wanted a country without our Constitution.
The totalitarian always imagines the utopia where he’s on the top of the pile rewarding those who agree with him and punishing those who don’t. They never imagine the dystopia that everyone else has to endure…
It’s a little more complicated than that. He was too trusting of the Soviets and saw them as a souped up version of the New Deal (thanks to a massive US media campaign, spearheaded by the NYT and his own State Department)
But there is another element, a healthy justified suspicion of the British.
During the war, the Brits wanted the Germans defeated, but in the process they were VERY willing to harness US force and diplomacy to maintain their colonies. Our leaders were not supportive of the Mediterranean and African operations and wanted to go directly into Europe much earlier. People can debate whether that was good or not, but the reason Churchill pushed for it so hard is that the Med was filled with British Empire interests.
In post war Europe, the Brits crushed a nationalist uprising in Greece. And then the communist Greek civil war was launched.
But Roosevelt was playing a bit of chess as far as who was going to get what. Short of us going to war with the Red Army, eastern Europe was going to be soviet controlled. So playing at the margins was all that was realistically possible.
Where I fault Roosevelt AND Churchill most was operation Keelhaul. That was truly depraved and they both knew to a certainty what would happen to those guys.
But back then, British friendship very transactional for DC. As late as Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis, we did not rush to help them with colonial problems. They resented that American forces were not committed.
That was before Globalism. I also wonder how much Roosevelt’s infirmity was a contributor. I think being helpless made him lean towards liberalism, and the lack of mobility meant he could basically only consider what people would bring to him. But he could not walk down the hall, etc. That makes him very dependent upon hyper lib-Eleanor and the staff that controlled him. That position had to narrow his understanding.
In some ways he did a great job during the war, especially in the ramp up before Pearl Harbor. He managed the British well. And he let Marshall run the military. Henry Stimson was another fantastic pick.